Rosters set… and include our Lyonnais players

By: Melissa | March 25th, 2009

Today was the day for each team to finalise their rosters down to 18 players plus 4 development slots. the results are here. And on opening day, we may see both controversial French players, Camille Abily and Sonia Bompastor on the field at the Home Depot Center. Inara of the Lyon blog brought up the issue a few weeks ago and explained:

Just a few weeks ago, [WPS] snapped up Camille Abily and Sonia Bompastor, two of Lyon’s best players. Worse still, they signed them after Lyon’s transfer season ended and provided no recompense to the club. Abily and Bompastor chose to leave Lyon midseason because they feared the WPS’s offer wouldn’t be there if they waited until the summer.

This had Lyon really mad, so they published a press release on their official website threatening to take “action.” The WPS said whatever, the players said whatever (albeit in a more apologetic way), and everyone thought the matter was closed. After all, Lyon had no true legal ground to stand on. The reason for that is because women’s football is still treated as an amateur sport in France, and so the neither Abily nor Bompastor had binding contracts with Lyon. The only thing that ties them to OL as footballers is their player registration.

As it turns out, Lyonnais President Jean-Michel Aulas convinced the French Football Federation to refuse to release the players’ international transfer certificates, and according to this site, he already filed a lawsuit against the players for — wait, did google translator get that right? — 500,000 euros?!?! On the WPS side, COO Mary Harvey tells Soccer America that they’ve already gotten FIFA involved. I think at this point, it’s still unknown if the issue really is completely resolved but either way the two French players made the opening day cut. I guess we’ll know for sure if we see them actually step onto the field on Sunday.

As for Aulas, no idea if he’s going to continue with the lawsuit. But he is certainly hurt by the turn of events. He is quoted in that Soccer America article: We’ll have to cope with the departures of Camille Abily and Sonia Bompastor. They abandoned us. It’s not a sporting disappointment, it’s more from a human point of view. This is it. I won’t say more. I just think that one must finish what we started. It’s a life principle. Individual interest must not be the only thing. Since I know very little about French football, I don’t really know what to make of his words, except in that messageboard post I linked to above, the people making comments were not pleased with Aulas and considered his actions to be very chauvinistic.